Lockland fires superintendent

Aug. 23, 2012

Donna Hubbard / Dee Amos/The Enquirer

Written by

Denise Smith Amos

LOCKLAND — Lockland's school board voted Thursday night to fire its superintendent and her son – who also worked in the district – becoming the first Ohio district to push out its top administrator over the recent accusations of student records manipulation.

Superintendent Donna Hubbard and son Adam Stewart – the district’s data coordinator – said through their attorney they plan to fight the action.

The board’s votes came after a two-and-a-half-hour closed-door meeting. The small school district is under state investigation for improperly listing 37 Lockland students as withdrawn from the district in 2010-11. The board voted 3-1 to fire Hubbard and unanimously to fire Stewart. One seat is unfilled; Colleen Carter was the lone ‘no’ vote.

The whole board declined to comment after the vote.

All 37 students failed all or parts of the state achievement or graduation tests. The state says because Lockland listed them as withdrawn, the district and school report card scores were inflated.

Hubbard has been on paid leave since Aug. 1. Stewart was put on paid leave July 27, said Konrad Kircher, their lawyer.

Kircher and Hubbard asked the school board to discuss her and her son’s employment situation in public Thursday night; the board declined.

They both spoke in defense of the practice of “scrubbing” the attendance data, with Kircher calling the process “correcting” the data.

“I have not conducted a covert operation behind closed doors to manipulate data to make our report card look good,” said Hubbard, who has worked for the district as a teacher and administrator for more than 37 years.

Kircher said that since state Auditor Dave Yost recently asked all Ohio districts to self-report their own improper student data, at least 25 districts responded by Monday .

Yost has not disclosed which districts and what they said, but Kircher said that the number is further evidence that districts may have been given incorrect or confusing instructions on how to handle truant students’ attendance data.

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So far, state officials have said Columbus City Schools, Lockland and Toledo engaged in data manipulation to improve their state report card ratings. He has said he’ll investigate 100 more districts.

The state also has delayed releasing this year’s report cards until the state investigations are complete, possibly some time this fall, Yost has said.

Kircher told the Lockland school board that Lockland “has nothing to be ashamed of.”

Hubbard and Kircher said district data staff, including Stewart, were doing what they were coached to do by staff at the Hamilton/Clermont Cooperative Association, a public agency that advises districts.

Hubbard and Kircher also read to the board a few emails between her and staff members at the association asking for assistance on changing some students’ coding so their test scores would not count against the district.

Hubbard said she believed she was doing the responsible thing, not cheating, since Ohio rules say not to count student test scores unless a student has had at least 120 days of instruction. Hubbard said the 36 contested students were frequently absent for a variety of reasons.

After Hubbard spoke, the board went back into executive session over the objections of Kircher, who asked in vain that the board keep minutes of the closed-door meeting.

State officials over the past year investigated and recalculated the district's and schools' test score data and revised Lockland's state rating downward. Now the formerly Effective district is rated as Continuous Improvement, the fourth-lowest of six state designations.

Kircher has said his client was not trying to cheat but was doing something she'd been instructed to do over the years and had thought was acceptable.

The students whose scores she sought to nullify were chronically absent, he said. He said the state's data system lets districts consider them dropouts or transfers.

Toledo has been accused of calling such students dropouts; Lockland's designation of choice was transfers.

A letter from Lockland’s interim superintendent, Dan Lawler, to Hubbard says he is recommending she be suspended without pay during the termination proceedings.